Once again, I must extend my deepest, and most sincerest apologies to you all. Recently, at work, they’ve cracked down and completely blocked all external internet sites, and on top of that, run regular scheduled centerwide scans for any open browser that bypasses the firewall. Seeing as work was my primary place of blogging adventures because typically when I get home, I’m swamped with like… everything… I haven’t had much time, if any, to post anything remotely interesting.

In my folder, I’ve got tons of screenshots, quotes, Socializing 101 ideas, and all around qwirky randomness everyone I know loves and enjoys. I promise I’ll be able to pick it up once again when the insanity in my life starts to die down. But till then, here’s a summary of what you’ve missed.

Mika’s Top 10 This Week:

1. Amber is still a noob.
2. The guild downed Mimiron, Vezax, and got Yogg into phase 2 before we started having problems.
3. I’ve rolled 3 new toons. 2 on the Earthen Ring server, look for Reikyva (58- Nelf DK) or Ryni (5-Nelf Rogue) if your interested for some fun RP, or Sylvyya (5-Belf Rogue) on Cenarion Circle ^_~
4. Reì on Azgalor has been racking achievements left and right and occationally topping charts.
5. My RP blog still isn’t quite finished yet, still putting the final touches on that one too.
6. Thanks to Tharion Greyseer he’s helping me get some reference points to get a possible career in writing off the ground, so I’m looking into that.
7. I’m getting ready for the big move, leaving on October 1st (Yay!)
8. Guild Drama has escalated through the roof because of a particular Hunter who is the single most egotistical, self-centered, rude, arrogant, piece of sixteen year old shit I’ve ever met.
9. Mika finally did ToC 10 man with a pug who one shot everything but faction champtions. (We had no mages, no locks, no hunters… virtually no CC. BURN THE DPS!!)
10. Did I mention Amber is still a noob?

There it is, folks… Mika’s Top 10 You Missed this week.

Disclaimer: I’ll be going into further details in the near future regarding some points… Amber’s failsauce… self-explainitory.

Once again, thank you thank you soooo much for being patient with me, and I’m soooo sorry for slacking. Point and laugh… I’m a scrub, lol.

Not a long post today, work has me swamped for once and my supervisor is breathing down my neck.

The Good- I had quite a busy weekend. My trip to Chicago was amazing, I had a blast. I met some great people and saw some awesome places, I’m really looking forward to moving there in a month after I sort out my life here in Florida.

The Bad- I found out last night that I have the worst luck in the game. I’m not going to go into QQ details, but when I see myself investing so much time and effort into something, be it my druid or my shaman, I can’t seem to beat the Loot Table and RNG bosses. If anyone knows a strat… please… shoot it my way.

The Worst- I’m going to be taking an extended break from my shaman after tonight. I’m going to try to run a Naxx 25 on her, but if things go as they’ve been, I’m going to be parking her in Dal and letting her time run out. She’s been nothing but a headache and a frustration ever since she hit 80.

It’s hard to over-look some things, and when you try to put forth as much effort as you can and notice you’re only bashing your head against a brick wall for hours and hours on end, it’s disheartening to say the least.

That’s my weekend recap.

Now, for random Mika facts!

Mika was actually born in Alabama.

Mika has only lived in Alabama, Texas, and Florida… soon to add Illinois to the list!

Mika loves Basshunter.

Mika is craving white chocolate… like… really bad.

Mika is an avid car enthusiast, and one day plans on owning a Mitsu Evo IX MR.

Mika played soccer for 8 years, and played the flute for just as long.

Mika was in her high school band, on the dance line and flag core for fall, and concert band flute for spring.

As of yesterday, Patch 3.2 was live and ready for download in all of it’s bittersweet glory. People were scrambling for DK respec ideas, hording the new JC patterns, frantically trying to get as many epic gems as possible, struggling to conquer the new instance, and amongst all this, we experienced server lag almost in comparison to when Ulduar was released. So now for the fun part…

What did I think of 3.2?

The Pros:

All around I’m pleased with the numerous features that were released with the patch. The new epic gems and JC patters are AMAZING. It was rather amusing listening to the JCs of my guild try and colaberate who was getting what gem to spend the least amount of tokens as possible to be able to cut as wide a variety as possible for progression.

As for the new instance, I grouped with Mach, Atropus (DK), Harry(Lock), and Sheala(DK). 3 Melee and 2 ranged… not fun. Our first time around we decided it would be a good idea to do it on regular mode before heroic to get a feel for the instance. (Taking it one step at a time.) First time in, we kinda had a brief rundown by Josh and Amber on how the pulls went. Jousting, then ground pulls, then the Black Knight. Didn’t seem too hard?

Jousting wasn’t as difficult as I had thought it would be, just your typical run of the mill with 4 other people on horse-back killing shit. The only problem we encountered was the NPCs occationally would bug out and wouldn’t dismount when knocked off, and pretty much ran us out of the arena. Luckily, the bosses were waiting for us when we got back and we didn’t have to restart.

After that the mobs for the big pally fucker were like punching a baby… too easy. I was kinda disappointed in the blind effect he does (yes, I intentionally looked just to see what would happen) and it lasted for all of 2 seconds, in which in regular, isn’t bad at all. The fun part came to the Black Knight. Three phases, no biggie right?

Wrong!

Little did our melee know that ghouls go ‘SPLODY!! And inadvertenly caused us to wipe, not once, but twice. Hey… I’m a HoT druid… with 1 AoE heal on a 3 min CD, and 1 AoE heal on a 6 sec CD…. I CAN’T HEAL ALL THAT DAMAGE!! After that, we downed him, and got epic loots. The Black Heart dropped and I won it for an offspec, but since I was running with two of the progression tanks, I had to resentfully give it up to Atropus, WHO WANTED TO BITCH ABOUT TAKING IT FROM ME AFTER BITCHING ABOUT ME TAKING IT FROM HIM!!!! aludfha;skjhga;dfg

After pwning the instance on regular, we went and owned face, a little wiser, on heroic, which seemed just as easy. After both runs, I walked out with two pieces of feral gear, a pair of gloves and bracers, that’ll significantly help with my tanking set.

I was so busy last night running instances for emblems that I didn’t get a chance to really play around on my shaman. I managed to organize her new totem bar, but that was about the extent of it. Today before Ulduar I plan on getting on her for a bit to play around with her resto spec. I’ll be able to get back to you on her awesome leet OP healing tomorrow.

And now…

The Cons:

Nothing bugs me more than when my 132,000 addons all decide to bug out at once after a patch because there’s no update for them, and then this LUA Error Message box lists all 5,471 error messages that I’m experiencing. Instead of fiddling with it that very moment, I was being rushed to hurry into the new instance, so I said fuck it and disabled all of them.

I never realized before how odd the default UI looked.

I was so confused, didn’t know where all my heals were, it was chaos. I know it’s going to need to be fixed by tonight for the raid.

On top of that, the kitty nerfs did hit me pretty hard, so I decided that instead of having to look at the decrease in my numbers, I threw out 35g and respec’d to a tank spec… which I screwed up and have to go back and redo. /sigh.

This patch is still going to take some getting used to, but in all it’s starting to grow on me.

It never fails, when patch day hits, everyone questions one or two changes made to thier class. “Should I change my spec this way, up my rotation that way, etc.” Blizzard likes to keep us on our toes by constantly making changes to a talent or a commenly used ability that a lot of people love to spam, to make us think outside the box, change things up a bit, and adapt to keep the game interesting… or at least that’s what I hope they’re doing. >.>

Well, when I first saw the patch notes and what they’re doing to kittys, I almost resorted to my little dark corner to cry and /wrists a few times. My days of topping meters were going to be put in the dark… but that’s what happens where you’re a hybrid able to out DPS a pure class. So I basically should’ve seen it coming.

Now, from some people I’ve talked to, the nerfs won’t be making a SEVERE impact, just kinda shaving the top of our DPS to level us out a bit. I guess that is to be determined after a bit of play time to test what my kitty is now capable of. But at least I have one thing to look forward too.

NEW KITTEH FORMS!!

Yup, running around as a little white albino kitty is going to be adorable. The bear will be, meh… but not as good. Never the less, I might as well get used to it since I’m looking at tanking as a viable option now.

I’m really excited for the new instances. I looooove exploring new content, even if it does cost a high amount of repair bills. But the way I see it, the shiny new purples in the end make it all worth it… even if the shiny new purples end up costing a lot of money too.

As for my shaman, I’m all around mostly pleased with the shaman changes. I LOVE the new totem feature, and I’m glad I don’t have to spend half an hour laying out my totems one by one. Mostly, I love the fact that now my inturrupt doesn’t share a cooldown with the shock spells of my rotation, so if I need it, it’s always up!.

And don’t get me started on the healing boosts. Blizz… you might’ve raped my druid, but you loved my shaman!

Last night my guild went in to finish up our first Ulduar 25 we had begun on Wednesday. The run on Monday didn’t go as horribly as some of us assumed it would, we actually managed to down Loot Mobile, Razorscale, and Ignis. (In all honesty the Ignis down was a total shock after wiping so many times.) Well as we went back in last night, we had hopes of clearing up to Kolo, and putting in attempts as IC and Auriaya.

Well, I’ve realized you can’t always get what you ask for. As painful as it was last night, we only managed to down XT.

We attempted Kolo, but his problem was people were constantly sawing people in half with the lazer… WTF!? Because it’s so hard to see a giant beam of blue light following you. On top of that, the DPS we had wasn’t quit meeting the minimum standard we were hoping for. I was resto for this particular raid, but as kitty I can usually hold my own in a 25 man pulling roughly 3-4k depending on the situation in my T7 and miscellaneous Naxx 25 gear.

Boss-man Mach wanted to have a minumum of 3K DPS that some people, granted it was mostly because of thier gear level, couldn’t quite meet that minimum requirement. So, the only solution, to try and continue as many Naxx 25 and Ulduar 10 raids as possible to gear the remaining members of our guild to Ulduar 25 standards. There’s only one small problem.

We have 3 main tanks in the guild, and only a few members who have alts or off-specs to tank and are willing to put up with the harrassment in raids we give our tanks. On top of that, all three of them are limiting thier tanking quota so they don’t get burnt out. So the question is who are we going to pester to tank these Naxx 25 and Ulduar 10 mans?

“You know Mika…. we don’t have a druid tank…”

“>.> Yeah…. aaaaaand??”

“Well you ARE the only kitty in the guild…”

“Sooo….???”

“Well it wouldn’t be hard for you to swap out some gems and gear and you-”

“Hahahahahaha…. WHAT!?”

And that is how I was guilted into considering to tank for the guild’s lower raids.

So today at work I’ve spent my morning reading up on different forums and blogs doing my research for stats that druid tanks require. It doesn’t seem that difficult, to sum everything up I’ve come to the conclusion I can be hit capped, expertise capped, with ~37k health and 35k armor in a week or two, no problem. Between being an avoidence or mitigation tank was a bit of a tough choice, but from the readings I’ve gathered, mitigation is the way to go in progression content for druid tanks.

After being a healer for so long, it’ll be interesting to see things from the other end of the spectrum.